Girls and Gadgets at Teesside University

December 2013

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Year 9 Students outside of the Europa Building at Teesside University.

On Thursday 19th December, eight Year 9 girls visited the University of Teesside for the "Girls and Gadgets Conference" where they were joined by thirteen other North-East schools.

At the start of the conference the girls were welcomed by the senior lecturer Alison Brown who gave a talk about her journey into a career in computing. This was then followed by the main speaker; Gabrielle Kent recently named as one of the top 100 women in the games industry who is the Deputy Head of the Computer Games Department. She gave an inspirational speech about her career and opportunities for women in the gaming industry.

The girls were then divided into groups and attended two workshops where they had the opportunity to firstly use Unity 3D a cross-platform game engine to program a game and then in the afternoon they attended a workshop where they were introduced to UDK and were able to create a new level for a game. They were also able to meet current university students who had various interests such as animation, concept design and programming.

The girls seemed to really enjoy the day and will hopefully feel inspired to consider a career in computing.